Nostalgia has been ruling the beauty roost for years now – I blame it on a desire for a simpler life – so I knew it was only a matter of time before what I think of as 'my era' AKA the early to mid-2000s, was back in the spotlight.
And I was right! An email dropped into my inbox this morning with the subject line: 'The MySpace Girl Is Back – and She’s Never Looked Better' and I rubbed my hands in glee, picturing a press release about mega side-swept fringes, ridiculously thick black eyeliner and absolutely never, ever looking into the camera in your selfies.
So, imagine my dismay when I opened the email and was met by pink sparkle, gloss and glamour. "The beauty world is officially entering its throwback era, and this time it’s all about high-shine nostalgia," it read. "The iconic “MySpace girl” aesthetic, defined by glossy eyelids, shimmering accents and playful glam is making a bold return for 2026."
No shade to the email or the brand – it was beautiful, and 2026 me is keen to try the makeup they're promoting, but gloss, shimmer and playful are not words associated with the MySpace girl. We were tortured and complex!
Getting it wrong
Subcultures have always been an interesting one for beauty to tap into. It's fun to lean into a gothic vibe, with ultra-dark lips and minimalist eye makeup, and it's long been a pleasure to borrow from the grunge scene with smudged makeup – and the MySpace emo-look deserves its time in the spotlight too, but only if it's properly represented.
Rebranding it to sparkles and gloss to shoehorn products that simply would not have found themselves anywhere near my ultra-heavy, black-only makeup stash of 2005, makes young me turn in her grave.
The true MySpace girl
I'd be disingenuous if I claimed the MySpace girl was original. She was still part of a scene, where key markers (the afore-mentioned heavy fringe and liner) signified you had a MySpace page rather than the more polished option - a Bebo profile. Shudder.
There was an emo-mocking song back in the day, with the lyrics "I'm an emo kid, non-conforming as can be, you'd be non-conforming too if you looked just like me," and yes, we followed a uniform of sorts, but what set MySpace girls apart was the total lack of perfection.
Yes, there was a look you had to subscribe to, but unlike now, where 'clean girl' makeup and slicked back hair make Gen Z look like clones of Molly-Mae (again, no shade, I love Molly-Mae), emo was a rebellion against the world of perfect popstars we'd been brought up on.
Make no mistake, we were teenagers and we obviously cared painfully about what people thought, but it was messy, not curated in the way social media is now – and trying to fit 'MySpace girl makeup' into the current beauty lexicon is akin to putting a round peg in a square hole.
By all means, let's bring the MySpace girl 'aesthetic' as they'd call it now into 2026, but let's not claim it's something it wasn't – or make it one of the flash-in-the-pan trends that comes and goes quicker than a non-waterproof eyeliner.
Trend turnover
Trend turnover is one of the main ways beauty now is different to the early 2000s/ While social media was big back when I was a teenager (we're talking about MySpace, after all, which was a social media platform). it didn’t churn out new trends on a weekly basis like TikTok does. We locked into the emo look, and there we stayed until we grew out of it and couldn't wear our heavy liner and lip piercings to our office jobs.
How to wear MySpace makeup
If you do want to give the MySpace girl look a whirl, it's extremely easy. Side sweep your fringe (we saw a lot of this at awards season, with Addison Rae leading the way), draw your eyeliner on thick (it doesn’t need to be precise, it just needs to be heavy – not smudged though, because that veers into grunge) and finally, slide a few hairclips in. The one absolute no-no? Glow. We were not glowing. Leave that to the clean girls.
